The present invention relates to a moving vane type compressor suited to use particularly in such fields as requiring light-weight compressors of this type.
To reduce the total weight of a compressor in, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,312,382, a moving vane type compressor is proposed having a rotor made of aluminum or a sintered material in order to reduce the total weight of the compressor.
However, the sintered material cannot be used as the material of the cylinder of the compressor because the internal pores of the sintered material, when used as the material of the cylinder, undesirably permit an external leak of the gas compressed in the compressor through the pores. The cylinder has to have a wear resistance large enough to sustain the friction with the moving vanes. Therefore, the cylinders of the compressors of this type are produced by casting from ferrous material and the inner peripheral surfaces finely are polished after quenching.
The cylinder made by casting from a ferrous material has a considerably heavy weight, thus making it difficult to reduce the total weight of the compressor. In addition, a long time is required for the polishing of the inner peripheral surface of the cylinder.
Accordingly, an object of the invention is to make it possible to use a light-weight sintered alloy as the material of the cylinder which houses a compressed fluid.
To this end, according to the invention, a liquid is supplied from the outer peripheral surface of the cylinder made of a sintered metallic material into the pores of the sintered metallic material such as to block these pores, thus preventing external leak of the fluid compressed in the cylinder through the pores. Thus, the invention makes it possible to use a light-weight sintered alloy as the material of the cylinder, so that the weight of the cylinder and, hence, the total weight of the compressor can be reduced advantageously.